“You will?” I asked, without expectation. Still, the knot in my chest loosened at his promise. Those few days on the ship, years ago, had shifted something between us.
“I wouldn’t miss it,” he said, a tight smile tugging at the corner of his mouth as he nudged me toward the first step.
I hesitated. Then, on instinct, I turned and threw myself into him, looping my arms around his neck. Trusting him to catch me.
He always did.
Spinning me once, he held me tight as I pressed my face against the warmth of his chest, an air of darkness dancing around us in a show of phantom and shadow.
When he set me down, he reached up and pushed my mask to rest atop my head. Then, softly, he kissed my temple, lingering there as if the moment could leave a mark. And maybe it did.
“Go, Tempest,” he commanded.
I didn’t speak. Just squeezed his hand once, then again for good measure, before lifting my skirts and climbing the stairs, each step heavier than the last.
I told myself not to look back, but of course I did.
At the final step, I turned.
And he was gone.
No trace of him remained, only the hush of the garden and the cold settling in my chest reminding me of my grief.
The next morning, hands gripping the railing, I stared out over the sea. England had all but vanished from view, and still, no sign of him.
The wind whipped my hair wildly, violently. Just the way he would’ve admired. Somewhere deep inside, I knew.
He wasn’t coming. At least not over the journey home.Maybe not at all.
True to form, he vanished—broken promises trailing after him, cloaked in the tattered guise of hope.
This must be what it feels like to surrender to Death, I thought. Not in the final sense—I wasn’t allowed that—but in the way a tired heart leans toward silence. It was harrowing. A daydream decayed by ivy and rot. A tangled and twisting ache that left behind pebbled skin and thoughts I didn’t want to name.
If I hadn’t felt his touch the night before, if he hadn’t whispered to me in the garden, cloaked in black and sorrow…
I might’ve believed I imagined it all.
But he answered when I called his name.Grim.
It wasn’t a dream at all, he just buried it deep—and neither of us could care to dig it out.
fourteen
Grim
Ididn’t need to sift through her thoughts to know she was stuck in the memory of that fateful winter night. The night she’d given me my name. The night I’d almost kissed her.
The bitter end I hadn’t realized I’d needed.
There were signs, many of them. Signs that I was becoming strangely, and uncomfortably, attached to the girl with unruly red hair and emerald eyes. I owed her nothing. Quite the opposite, in fact, as she owed meeverything.Just like her godforsaken name, she was trulytempting.
It was why I refused to stay.
Drawn to her, I appeared throughout her timeline, as a smudge she could never quite erase. One night in the gardens had been enough to realize that her malediction was surely mine too. Her skin glowed beneath my color, the glittering ballgown clinging to her in a way that had me consuming her fragrance—iris and asphodel, regret and sorrow intertwined.
If I had shown up on that ship…
I shook the thought from my mind, pulling my focus back to the woman before me.
